


This Is How The World Ends

by isthatacatsherlock



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Molly Hooper - Freeform, References to Suicide, Sherlock Holmes - Freeform, Suicide, Work, graphic description of suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-10
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 12:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/836682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthatacatsherlock/pseuds/isthatacatsherlock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Read the tags! This fic is potentially triggering for suicide.)</p><p> </p><p>There was a reason Molly worked with dead bodies all the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is How The World Ends

"We don't want you at the funeral." When her sister said that over brunch, she sounded so sodding...uncomfortable, which honestly pissed Molly off. Their mom had died a few days before. Suicide. Molly was the one with the adolescence marked with five or six suicide attempts and institutionalizations and her mother, Linda, had always been at her emergency room bedside prepared with a sarcastic remark about how *she* never quit when life got difficult. Until that moment, Molly was debating whether or not to actually go to the funeral. 

She wouldn't be missed there. She knew that much. So it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to make an excuse. They could just continue to call her a crazy bitch and leave it at that.  
'Molly...she...you know, I don't even know what she does. She works with post mortems. Dead bodies all the time. Attempted suicide several times, you know. Gave Linda plenty of gray hairs, that one.' 

The talk would go on whether she was in the room or not, and whether she was there or not she would be branded selfish in some way. So she was still up in the air about it when....that happened. Margaret Hooper sitting across from her so...almost smug in her discomfort. As if she was slumming it here, not by the locale or the food, which neither of them had touched- but by being seen with Molly. She didn't argue, but what exactly do you say to 'we don't want you at the funeral?' She birthed me too? But it looked like her younger sister had just given her an out, albeit making her feel five years old again. 

She went home after putting a couple of bills on the table, an attempt to assert that up until that moment her life had been going just fine, thank you. Holding it together, for sure, even if now she was careening out of control. Her body betrayed her with the shaking and she walked away. "Happy Birthday, Molly," Margaret called. She would be...she would be thirty.

The age she didn't know what to do with but she was supposed to be...something now. Something that was not this, for sure. Her mom's favorite subject was how mousy she was, and how she'd never get a man and everything along those lines. Molly had never had an orgasm. She'd had sex, granted. But it always felt like more of a military occupation than anything remotely erotic- dicks stabbing her, rather than pushing her over an ostensibly blissful edge.

She'd masturbated, but every time she even remotely got to the edge, she had stopped because it was too overwhelming to continue. Bugger marriage and kids- you were definitely supposed to have had an orgasm by thirty. So...she tried. She went into her closet, in a box toward the back, and got out a ridiculous looking red, sparkly dildo she had bought a few years prior. She pushed everything out of her mind and tried. For several hours. 

Tried until it hurt. Nothing this time. She wasn't even going to step over the edge but her body wouldn't give her anything at all. It was when she retired to bed that the plan fastened into place so easily as those toddler sized legos she played with at play dates with her niece sometimes. Molly may be bloody useless, her family seemed to reckon, but she makes an okay babysitter.

Click. It should have scared her, the efficiency of how calm everything went. She knew this feeling, like the 'Last Strength' of cancer but for a dying mind instead. It occur to her while she lay there that her mother was the only emergency contact listed anywhere and if any solid attempt failed, she could be spared the bedside talks. The looks. The 'not again, Molly.'

Of course she had attempted and failed on purpose before as a teenager and young adult. Death, though she dealt with it often enough, was an incredibly scary frontier. Usually. Now, it was simple. Everything was a scary frontier until you had gas and car keys. She had the day off that morning but chose to go in anyway. 

Sherlock came into the morgue at ten am or so, definitely looking, and not at her hairstyle or her shoes, or the shade of lipstick she wore today. Were this man's senses supernatural or something? No. He couldn't possibly have had a clue. The body she was working with belonged to a morbidly obese white man in his fifties with a balding problem and eczema. In death and after rigor mortis wore off, his penis shrunk back into his flesh.

This was common enough, even among the living. She wondered what her body would look like in these circumstances. She was imagining herself on the same kind of slab. 

"Morning, Molly," said Sherlock. There was one factor she'd forgotten to take into account. One part of it she had forgotten because, maybe, it had been so long- how bloody difficult it had been to socially interact when her mind had crossed the barrier from diseased to dying.  
"H-hi, Sherlock," she got out.  
"Aren't you off today?" Came John's voice, quiet as a church mouse, she'd not known he was even there. "Your mom's funer..." he trailed off, realizing that he shouldn't have said anything a bit too late.  
"Um, I chose to skip it." She returned to the autopsy she had been performing. When she looked up again, Sherlock was alone. John had taken his leave.  
"Are you alright?" Sherlock began. She knew he wasn't one for mediocre social formalities, so, thinking that at least one or two ulterior motives involving favors was at play, she merely listened. "I...I know you're not alright. I just mean, are you okay?" Molly looked up, scalpel in hand. Of course, she was honest.  
"Yes. I'm fine." It didn't feel sick or diseased or...not alright, as it were, to want to end her life, to know that she was going to end her life, and to plan on it, knowing it would succeed.  
"Okay." He left as well, both of them aware of what the difference between 'not alright' and 'not okay' was. She didn't see him until lunch, when she sat staring at her pasta. Sherlock actually had a plate with him, so he must not be working. Pizza. Ha. For a man who wore Bespokes suits to the grocery store, pizza was an interesting choice. She half smiled at him. 

Her brain felt disconnected at this point and she did not know how well she would be able to socialize with him. She had quit work prematurely because she could not concentrate.  
"How did he die? One of the suicide cases, is it?" She nodded, regarding the file in front of her.  
"Uh...yes," she said, pulling herself together. For all of the romance literature and movies conjured regarding overdoses, hospital and post mortem staff regarded overdosing as somewhat of a joke.  
"ODed on Lunesta. And...Tramadol. Yeah."  
"Mmm."  
"The report says he'd been chatting online to someone during the hyperchardia, but didn't reach out. It's the scariest part," she said quietly. She intimately knew what it felt like, your heart speeding up before the ultimate act of bursting, stopping, not coming back. You did not just fall asleep. How brave had that man had to be in order to not reach out for help?  
"Mmm, yes. Quite a lonely way to die, though." This comment struck her as out of character for Sherlock, like he could read her own plans and was making fun of their utter dullness. He was getting too close. She would have to speed it up to tonight.

Sherlock could tell the moment he laid eyes on her when she was supposed to be at the funeral. Alarm bells that had little to do with deduction rang out and he just...knew. Conversation merely confirmed it and so, after lunch with her, where neither of them ate, he told John, and then he told Greg.  
"Do you think she's going to do it soon?" John had asked, himself more than experienced with this. He had dealt with plenty of suicidal soldiers, talked them down from the brink. Sherlock nodded, and he didn't know if he was right. But he did know that Molly wasn't okay. She they went. John and sherlock in one taxi and Lestrade and Donovan in a squad car behind them. 

Just Sherlock and John went in. No need to scare her if, and he was dearly hoping- if they didn't already need an ambulance. John was about to knock when Sherlock pulled his arm down.  
"She's afraid of door knocks," he said quietly. Instead he got out his phone and texted her. John rolled his eyes as if this was all too ridiculous for him. 'I'm outside. Brought tea.' Which he had. It was in his coat pocket. Loose leaf. Her favorite. No answer. After a few minutes, John knocked loud and hard.

It was an old enough lock that Sherlock was able to open it with his bank card. The first thing Sherlock noticed upon entering was that the house hadnt. Been cleaned. It wasn't disastrous, just untidy. And the shower was running cold water. Sherlock walked around, observing. John found her in the hallway- dazed, yet frightened. She was sitting in a t shirt and men's boxer shorts, her hair wet and recently showered. It really was freezing. She sat like this in the hallway against the wall, staring at a lone thumbtack.  
"Molly," John said, quietly.  
'There are pills and a gun,' Sherlock texted him.  
'Hallway,' John texted back, then threw his phone aside. He cleared his throat. Molly hadn't acknowledged him yet. "Molly," he said again. She surveyed him and looked away, which he counted as acknowledgement. "Have you taken anything?" He asked gently, sitting down beside her. This could well be how she was acting prior to hyperchardia.

It struck him how lonely it would be to die this way, how much better Molly deserved out of life, and how much time there was left to get it. How this simply was not the end. He brushed his fingers over her hand. The water stopped running and, while John held onto her wrist to check her pulse, Molly looked up at Sherlock approaching them. He brought the pills with him and, after he told Lestrade to hold off for the moment- she's alive, he knelt down beside them on the side opposite John. He put the pills out of reach. She frowned, tears swimming in her eyes, and leaned against John.  
Molly was well aware of their presence. She just couldn't talk right now. Everything pressed down on her so. Hard. The door knock scared her, so she had hid here. The wake would be progressing by now. She noticed Sherlock guarding the pills. What had he done with her gun? Well, at least he hadn't found the rope, and she could always jump. 

It occurred to her that these two knew perfectly well what she was up to, and tears flooded her face awkwardly, betraying her. To hide this from Sherlock she dipped her face into John's shoulder. Hands rubbed her back and warm kisses touched her forehead. She also knew, too well, the effect suicide had on friendships. Friends who tried to rescue her. Friends she told. Friends she didn't. They all dissolved as if the crisis branded her impossible to talk to anymore. Molly could not bear this happening here. 

Arms tightened around her. She had lost her composure now, was sobbing. John was rocking her. She was here. Grounded. For now, so was he. He wasn't leaving. Showed no signs of disgust or revulsion. Molly was...she was exhausted. She rested a little heavier on John, and did not fight the finally happy drift from awake to asleep.


End file.
